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Letter from GEORGE PERKINS MARSH to CHARLES ELIOT NORTON, dated
July 2, 1864.,
Original located at the University of Vermont's Special Collections in the George
Perkins Marsh Collection, filed by date.,
http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/item/gpmcen640702 (accessed March 03, 2015)

Letter from GEORGE PERKINS MARSH to CHARLES ELIOT NORTON, dated
July 2, 1864.

Transcribed by
:

TEI mark-up by
:
James P. Tranowski andEllen Thomson

Published by: University of Vermont. All rights reserved.

Publication Information

Turin July 2 1864

My dear Sir

I have owed you a letter for a long time, but the delay to reply more definitely to
your proposal on the subject of contribution to the North
American has arisen from causes beyond my control. I had become engaged in
preparation for a work which would have engrossed all my leisure for some months,
and it is but very recently that I have come to the conclusion to postpone the
execution of it, if not to abandon the project -------------------------------- Page -------------------------------- altogether. The term you offer for articles
for the Review are very liberal, and the rate of compensation is very considerably
above what I have received, or am likely to receive, for anything I have yet
published. I shall therefore be very glad to furnish occasional articles, and have
already made many notes with a view to that object, but thus far the other
occupation I have mentioned has prevented me from reducing them into shape. Beside
this, I find my pen constantly straying into forbidden ground and before -------------------------------- Page -------------------------------- I can finish
anything, I must wait for a period--I will not say of greater leisure, for of time
or measured by hours, I have enough, but--of greater recueillement, which will, I hope, come later in the season.

I shall keep the subject constantly before me, and hope to send something in a few
weeks.

Our latest American news as to June 23, announcing a repulse of
Grant before Petersburg. This in telegraphic, & I hope not so bad
as Mr Reuter makes it. The defeat of the
proposal for amendment of the Constitution on the subject of slavery is
doing us much mischief, and will do us much -------------------------------- Page -------------------------------- more. I heartily wish--but I fear it is a
vain hope, that the administration could be induced to plant itself on an
anti-slavery platform. We shall have no signal success--deserve none--till then. I
know not what to make of a statement by the N York correspondent of
the London Daily News: that Mr Lincoln's nomination was carried, or at
least accompanied, by a pledge on his part to dismiss Seward
& Stanton--I see nothing of this in the American
papers. I should regret to see Mr Seward's foreign policy made the cause for his
removal. I certainly am far enough from approving his apparent lukewarmness on the
slavery question-- though I suppose Mr Blair to have
controlled the President much more effectually on this point, than Mr S. has
done--but his management of our foreign relations seems to me emi- [the following
appears at the top and left side of the page beginning "Turin July 2 1864"]
nently discrete and able. Is there any truth in this statement, and if so, who is to
succeed him? Is "nobody to blame" for Bank's wretched
failures, or will somebody be held accountable?